What Was She Thinking?
by Zoe Heller
When this came out a few years ago, the title made me assume that it was just another chic-lit thing. When the movie based on it came out, they used the book’s subtitle, Notes on a Scandal, as the movie title. It’s a much better title and a shame they didn’t use it as the title for the book, which deserves the better title. Heller’s novel is excellent, with a creepiness that reminds me of early Ian McEwan. The narrator, Barbara, is a stereotypical spinster school teacher, complete with aging cat. When Sheba, a young, attractive teacher arrives at the school, Barbara wants her friendship. When Sheba has an affair with a teenage student, Barbara seizes the opportunity to become part of and eventually control all of Sheba’s life.
As a fictional invention, Barbara is one of the most interesting unreliable narrators I’ve encountered. A nasty, bitter person, she describes most of the other characters with contempt, so that it’s not always clear what they’re really like. Furthermore, her description of herself is often completely opposite from how the outside world clearly sees her. Despite her pitifulness, she’s egomaniacal, with no understanding of how she is perceived.
I liked this a lot better than I thought I would. Jack Nicholson hams it up as usual, but the rest of the cast is great. Matt Damon is always a little more interesting as a bad guy—I find him a little cardboard as a hero. And Leonardo DiCaprio is finally starting to lookold enough to play an adult. The story line was neither overly simplistic nor complicated to the point of being impossible to follow. I’m interested to compare it to the Hong Kong movie it’s based on, Infernal Affairs. Time to add it to the Netlfix queue.
The heroine of this book isn’t the kind of girl who usually stars in YA novels—she doesn’t like to read, she does manual labor, and she doesn’t spend all her time thinking about boys. D.J. does most of the work on her family’s dairy farm after her father gets hurt. It’s a lot of work, more than most teenagers could imagine taking on. She’d never really talked to anyone, not even her family or her best friend. As the characters learn to talk to each other, she learns surprising things about everyone, including herself. Concerned about being no different than the cows in her obedience to expectations, D.J. decides on football, first by training the local opposing team’s quarterback and then by trying out for the local team herself.
It was my turn to pick our next book club book. We read fiction set in New York. I felt like we’d been reading too many contemporary books lately and too many books by men, so I picked The House of Mirth. I enjoyed reading it, despite not much liking the socialite characters (I have a hard time being that sympathetic for socialites). In comparison to the mediocre contemporary books we’ve been reading for book groups, classics always seem so well done. It’s a downer, of course, as all Edith Wharton books tend to be (bad circumstances leading to misery leading to death is the general idea).
After a few days in Quebec City, we went about 30 miles outside of the city to the Station Touristique Duchesnay, an outdoor sports and recreation area. We were in one of the smaller lodges, so it felt sort of like a winter camp. Outside our lodge was an ice skating rink, and it was empty when we got there, so we thought it was a perfect opportunity to try skating again. I had only been once before and E not much more, so we aren’t very good. But out there by ourselves, we started to feel like we were figuring it out a bit. Hopefully we’ll remember what we learned next time we try. We were just glad no one was watching, since it seemed like the Canadians were all born knowing how to ice skate.
The next day, we decided to try cross country skiing. We did one 5k trail and were feeling pretty confident (even though we were being passed by lots of old people), so we decided to do another 5k trail.We manged to get going pretty good, but we forgot to ask anyone how to slow down when going downhill in the cross country ski tracks. I ended up falling down to stop a few times. By the end of the second trail, we were feeling pretty worn out and sore. I had heard that cross country skiing is great exercise, so I assumed that would mean we’d be really sore the next day. Unfortunately, I was right about that and we were pretty sore the rest of our trip.
We had gone out to Duchesnay primarily to spend a night at the Ice Hotel, a hotel built entirely of snow and ice. The walls are built of packed snow, supported by pillars of ice blocks. The inside is full of ice sculptures and many of the rooms and suites had themed sculptures. We bundled up and spent the evening exploring the ice hotel. The bar inside serves drinks in glasses that are blocks of ice and we had some tasty maple whiskey while talking to the bartender, who had actually been on one of the crazy canoe race teams. We got in the hot tubs to warm up and then headed for our icy bed. Too keep the guests warm at night, they put everyone in expedition weight mummy bags. Not too surprisingly, neither of us slept that well. E managed to get cold in his mummy bag. I was warm enough, but I got tangled up in it and couldn’t find a comfortable position.
The next day we were pretty groggy until we headed out to the dogsledding kennels. We were both pretty excited about dogsledding and it turned out to be the highlight of our trip. When we got there, all the dogs were freaking out—they were ready to go run. We had a team of 6 dogs on our sled, following two other teams. We were pretty nervous about driving at first, but it wasn’t as hard as it had seemed. E took the hardest part, driving at the beginning while the dogs were all worked up. They took off pretty fast and whenever we had to stop, they’d start fighting each other and the guide had to come untangle them. By the time I took my turn, the dogs had settled down and were much calmer and slower. The two women with the team in front of us had more trouble, unfortunately, and took a header into a tree. After our ride, we went back to the kennel and got to play with the puppies. They were super cute, with very warm fuzzy coats.
Last week, we took a vacation to Quebec. I had wanted to go to Quebec years ago, when I saw pictures of the walled city with the Chateau Frontenac at the top. Last year, I read about their Winter Carnival and all of the kid-friendly activities. Since E and I are generally entertained by the same things that entertain kids, it sounded perfect for us.
Winter Carnival involved lots of snow sculptures. My favorite was the American entry in the international snow sculpture competition—a group of elephants. We felt bad for the Belgian team—their sculpture was looking great and when they were working on the last element, it collapsed. There were also snow slides, a soapbox derby race, and dance alongs featuring hilarious dance troops, particularly the group that led the snowsuit-clad crowd in line dancing. The Carnival goers carried plastic horns and plastic canes filled with the beverage of Carnival, a concoction of port, brandy, and triple sec known as caribou. We got a horn (I was much better at blowing the horn than E—guess having played the french horn badly was good for something), but decided we’d rather have our caribou in smaller doses. It doesn’t taste very good, but it definitely makes you warmer.
My favorite part of Winter Carnival was the canoe race. Teams do laps in the St. Laurence river. This is complicated by the fact that half of the river is a mass of moving chunks of ice. So the teams row upstream for part of the race, and then turn and go down the other side of the river on top of the ice. There’s too much ice to row, so they mostly run on the top of the ice, dragging the canoe. It looked insane. We got cold by the water watching the race, so I can’t imagine how cold it was to be wet and down on the ice.
For the most part, we weren’t too cold. It was mostly in the local digits. And we were wearing a lot of clothing. Each morning, we put on long underwear, fleece pullovers, ski pants, coats, two pairs of socks, scarves, hats, gloves, and boots. We didn’t mind the cold and were happy to see snow since it had been such a warm winter in New York. It snowed a few times while we were there, so the snow stayed mostly white and pretty, instead of grimy and gray like in New York. They said that there was less snow than usual, though, only about 2 feet instead of 6 feet.
One day was exra-cold though, around -10°F. We were walking around the city and whenever I took off my glove to take a picture, my hand went numb almost instantly. Luckily, we had planned that day to visit La Barberie, a local brewery. Mom had called them before we went to try and buy us a gift certificate. They couldn’t take a credit card, so they told her for us to just stop by and they’d give us a free tasting. The tastings were “carousels” of beer. Don’t worry—the glasses weren’t as big as they look in the picture. The 8 glass carousel added up to 2.5 pints. My favorite was the one flavored with raspberry and lime, but they were all very good. We had a great time tasting all the beers, chatting with one of the employees, and staying toasty warm inside.
I’ve really enjoyed Hill’s Dalziel/Pascoe series—sort of a cross between a classic British mystery and a modern gritty procedural. This book was a stand-alone mystery about two people looking into their troubled family histories. Both of the characters were too overly weird to sympathize with—an obessed Australian mathematician and a former priest who sees ghosts and has stigmata. The book ends up being more about their weirdness than about their mysteries. At some point, I actually lost track of what the characters were actually trying to figure out. I should have just waited for the next Daliziel/Pascoe book.
When I started planning the Quebec trip and the dogsledding, my parents recommended this book. Paulsen ran the Iditarod, which was a little more extreme than the hour-long dogsledding jaunt we were planning on, but a lot of things, particularly the mentality of the dogs, was similar to our experience.
This was definitely the kind of book that tends to win children’s book prizes: a young woman overcomes hardships to complete her education. This one won the Printz Award from the American Library Association. The prizes, generally voted on by librarians, tend to favor books in which the young hero or heroine has to overcome some sort of hardship (death of a parent, poverty, slavery, the Holocaust, or some combination). I guess they’re meant to be inspiring, but they’re not a lot of fun to read.